The caveman diet: Meat-eaters love it, critics call it 'a craze'

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors thrived on a daily menu of whatever was at hand until the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago.

Photograph by: Vancouver Sun
, Handout

Fruits, nuts, grass and whatever grubs, insects or game you can kill with your hands or a rock.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors thrived on a daily menu of whatever was at hand until the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, and a surprising number of dieters and fitness buffs are turning back their dietary clocks.

In a nutshell, the paleodiet is an attempt to approximate the caloric and nutritional intake that human beings evolved to eat, before we started to plant grain and legumes for their easy, abundant, but largely empty, calories. Or so the theory goes.

The modern menu includes grass-fed meats, fruits, cooked and raw vegetables, wild fish and unprocessed oils such as olive or avocado. Wheat, dairy and legumes, such as beans and peanuts, are not allowed because they are relatively recent additions to the human menu. Some versions forbid added salt. Most people limit or eliminate alcohol.

“It’s really popular, at least half the people at my gym are eating something like the caveman diet,” said Cassandra Kruger, a trainer at Momentum Fitness in Vancouver. “It’s in the same vein as the South Beach and Atkins diet in that they don’t include any refined carbohydrates, so no grains, no sugar, no flour and no processed foods.”

Ultralow carb diets induce ketosis, a state in which the body burns fat for energy. You will lose weight, but it is not without risk.

Warehouse manager Rahim Khan of Langley started on the paleodiet just before his 27th birthday. He weighed 250 pounds, heavy for his 5-foot-11 frame.

“Less than a year later I hit my optimal weight of 173 pounds,”said Khan, who lost weight even as he cut back on his workouts. “I used to be in the gym three or four days a week and sometimes for two hours, now it’s 30 minutes and I’m out.”

Khan, his wife Liz and their three children all follow the paleodiet at home. Exceptions have to be made when the kids visit their grandparents, Khan laughed.

“I was skeptical at first,” said Liz, who admits feeling sick and lethargic for the first two weeks after the change. “But I feel so much better now, I didn’t even know how lousy I felt before.”

The Khans eat grass-fed beef, pork and chicken, usually the fattiest cuts they can find. Wheat in all its forms has disappeared, along with soy and corn. Dairy is confined to butter and small amounts of aged cheese.

Fruits and vegetables make up the balance of the plate, which Rahim says he usually fills twice at supper time. When their personal workload gets heavy, the Khans will add a sweet potato with butter for extra energy.

“I like to just call it my lifestyle, it’s the most logical way to eat,” Rahim said. “What I do is based on the feedback my body gives. When I feel good I know I’m doing the right things.”

The cavemen diet is an attractive weight-management program, because it is naturally low in calories and you are generally encouraged to eat whenever you are hungry. But the paleolithic menu probably has the most traction with people who have gluten sensitivity or celiac disease.

“We decided we needed to investigate what might be the problem and we started to do an elimination diet,” she recalled.

Eva showed no change when dairy was removed from the menu. “But when we got to gluten it was completely different and rapidly different,” she said. “Within a week we noticed big changes, some we didn’t expect.”

“We thought she was a typical four-year-old until we started changing her diet,” Wedel said. “She was a terror with concentration problems and aggression, but once we started removing gluten it changed altogether.”

Wedel’s own allergies to nuts and to seafood meant there were few processed foods in the house anyway, but even fewer when the family began to eliminate sugar, artificial colourings and gluten.

Rather than keeping abundant carbohydrates in their diet with gluten-free breads and pasta, the Wedels just eliminated bread and grain-based foods such as pasta. At $7 a loaf for gluten-free bread, it just didn’t make sense.

“We eat meat every day and a whack of vegetables, usually in a stir-fry,” she said. “We don’t follow the strict paleodiet, if we have sushi we eat the rice and sometimes we have quinoa.”

Even though the Wedels don’t consider themselves paleodieters, Eva likes to joke that she is a caveman child. Lori’s husband Will, an engineer with the City of Chilliwack, is a big fan of the hefty portions of meat, usually chicken, pork and grass-fed beef.

“For me the biggest change was just deciding that not every meal had to be like my mom taught me, meat, potatoes, grain, you don’t need those to live,” she said.

When calories from wheat, rice, potatoes and refined sugar are eliminated from the diet, the ratio of fibre, vitamins, minerals and important nutrients per calorie consumed goes way up.

The exception is vitamin D, which hunter gatherers produced in great abundance because they lived outdoors and spent long hours walking and foraging.

“People have a hard time figuring out what to eat and this diet is healthy and very clear,” she said. “It removes all of the foods that cause us problems.”

Proponents of the caveman diet point out that so-called “diseases of civilization” — heart disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes — were not a problem to people who lived in the Paleolithic period, which ran from about 2.5 million years ago until farming took hold about 8,000 BCE.

“The paleodiet is naturally low-carb and focuses on clean protein sources like grass-fed beef, wild fish, naturally raised chicken and eggs,” said Eidsness. “Then you are going to have as many vegetables as you can possibly eat, with the possible exception of nightshade vegetables for people who are sensitive to them.”

Stricter paleodieters avoid eating members of the nightshade family, which includes peppers, eggplant, tomatoes and potatoes, in the belief that they cause loss of calcium and may trigger arthritis or autoimmune disease.

People transitioning to the caveman diet can expect a minor rebellion by their body. Many people experience lethargy, headaches and flu-like symptoms that Eidsness attributes to a withdrawal from the body’s addiction to sugar and carbohydrates.

Critics of the paleodiet trend point to a long list of incongruities, knowledge gaps about the true nature of man’s diet during the Paleolithic period.

A true paleolithic diet would probably include some wild game, tart berries, insects, roots and wild tubers, shellfish, rodents and the occasional cache of honey. But it would also vary enormously from north to south, coast to inland and continent to continent, ranging from a chimpanzee-like diet of fruits to a very fatty meat-based diet of seal and caribou consumed by Arctic peoples.

The truth is that defining a true paleolithic diet is next to impossible.

What we do know is that the abundant calories of cultivated grain gave rise to a massive human population boom and gave birth to permanent sedentary civilization, both of which roil unabated to this day.

In addition to the potential for health impacts from eating an ultra low-carb diet, a leading Canadian nutritionist warns that paleodieters often eat more meat than is healthy for them and the planet.

The environmental cost of a largely meat-based diet is probably the strongest argument against eating like a modern caveman, said David Jenkins, a professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto and Canada Research Chair in Nutrition and Metabolism.

Widely accepted estimates suggest it takes 16 kilos of grain to produce one kilo of beef and at least 441 gallons of water.

“The [caveman diet] craze is interesting in that it focuses on increased fibre foods, but people get bored of fibre if you can’t have it as bread or pasta or rice,” Jenkins said. “These are the starchy staples that allowed us to multiply on the face of the planet.”

Caveman diet proponents claim that eating what they believe to be the human ancestral diet will reduce their risk of disease, pointing out that Paleolithic era people were not afflicted with today’s most common ailments, many of which are associated with obesity and old age.

That idea might just hold water.

Pre-agricultural humans did live long enough to suffer from diseases of age and there is evidence arthritis was common, though obesity, heart disease and diabetes were rare or entirely absent.

Jenkins is skeptical that such dramatic alterations in our modern diet are key to better health.

“The first step in adopting a paleolithic lifestyle would be to throw away your car keys and walk everywhere,” he said. “The diet we have adopted over the past 10,000 years suits our physiology just fine if we are exercising. The problem is we put all these starchy calories in our body and then try to burn them driving everywhere in our cars.”

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